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Arms dealers infect British health service

On 29th January 2013, the arms industry‘s trade body, ADS, held a huge dinner to bring together top-level arms company representatives, and their guests: MPs, journalists and MoD representatives. Priced at £230 a head, campaigners couldn’t afford a ticket, but managed to find a way in nevertheless..

Choudhrie was previously investigated by the Indian police over his work on arms deals in India. At one point he was put on a list of “unscrupulous persons” by the Central Bureau of Investigations, India’s elite police agency. The Choudhries deny wrongdoing.

I became interested in the Choudhries mainly because their Alpha firms have NHS contracts.

It doesn’t seem right that arms-dealers are running three mental hospitals for the health service.

Inspectors from the Care Quality Commission have issued formal warnings and are “taking action” against Alpha’s private low-security mental health hospital which treats young people and adolescents for the NHS in Woking.

The inspectors have “warned Alpha Hospitals Limited that it needs to make immediate improvements at Alpha Hospital – Woking.”

Inspectors said that during unannounced visits they found the hospital “was failing to meet five of the six national standards,” including “care and welfare of people” and “safeguarding people from abuse.”

The details sounded even worse. Youngsters were put in seclusion for “whispering.” The teenagers in seclusion did not receive medical help even when they were seen “lying on the floor being sick” or” “rolling [their] eyes and losing balance.” Inspectors were told that “seclusion and inter-muscular injections are regularly used as threats.”

Last year inspections also uncovered other worries, including strip-searching and restraint.

Inspectors reported: “One female adolescent patient had been restrained by nine members of staff, one of whom was a male” because she refused to remove her underwear at the Woking hospital.

The Choudhries’ other mental hospitals were also criticised by inspectors. You would think that they would start losing contracts. Or even that they should never have got them in the first place.

Indeed, you might expect leading Lib Dem Simon Hughes to complain. After all Hughes has attacked the Tories for “widespread privatisation of NHS services” and demanded the “NHS should be responsive to patients’ needs, based on co-operation rather than competition, and promote quality and equity not the market.”

But the Choudhries’ Alpha firm has given £500,000 to the Lib Dems since 2010. At the end of last year the Choudhries gave £60,000 to Hughes’s own Lib Dem constituency party to help him get re-elected.

The Choudhries also used their own small charity to mingle with Lib Dems and other politicians.

Ironically, this charity, called Path to Success, mostly did this through donations to healthcare causes. Path to Success gave out around £200,000 over five years, so was pretty good value for company PR.

Bhanu Choudrie and his wife Simrin used the charity to host events with Norman Lamb MP – he is the Minister for Care, who should be shouting about poor conditions at their hospitals.

Lib Dem MP Paul Burstow also went to their events when he was a health minister.

Nick Clegg’s wife Miriam was patron of the Choudhrie’s charity – the pair even hosted an event for the charity. So the Lib Dems get some big money and have a few “charity” functions. We get stuck with an arms-dealing firm making a mess of the NHS.